What a home Scrypt (LTC + DOGE) miner costs to run on a UK tariff, with a free calculator

Mining
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Disclosure: I’m Guntis from Mineshop.eu, an EU mining-hardware shop in Ireland, so I have a commercial interest. The calculator below is free and open source: no sign-up, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

“Home” Scrypt miners are in a different league from the tiny SHA-256 lottery miners. They draw hundreds of watts, so the electricity bill decides almost everything. A quick way to get a real figure:

  1. Measure at the wall with a plug-in power meter for 24 hours. Rated figures are often optimistic.
  2. kWh per year = watts × hours per day × 365 ÷ 1,000.
  3. Multiply by your unit rate.

Examples at the UK Ofgem price cap for October to December 2026 (26.32p/kWh average, Direct Debit), running 24/7 at the rated power:

Miner (rated power) kWh a year Cost a year
Fluminer L2 (230 W) 2,015 about £530
VolcMiner D1 Mini (500 W) 4,380 about £1,153
Fluminer L1 (1,200 W) 10,512 about £2,767

Before you compare that with what the miner earns, remember that LTC and DOGE revenue changes daily with price and network hashrate, so check a live profitability source at your exact rate.

On a two-rate tariff such as Economy 7, a miner running 24/7 only gets the cheap rate during the off-peak window: with 7 off-peak hours, that is about 29% of its energy.

The heat is not wasted in winter if it replaces electric heating in the same room. In summer it is just extra load (and noise).

Free calculator (any wattage, single rate or two-rate tariff; source and tests are on GitHub, linked from the page): Home Bitcoin Miner Running Cost Calculator (UK): Price Cap vs Economy 7 | Mineshop

Longer UK write-up (legal status, noise, and import VAT when buying from the EU): ASIC Bitcoin Mining in the UK 2026: legal, cost and setup guide

What does your setup draw at the wall, and what rate are you paying?

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Good call on measuring at the wall. That pins down the one cost you actually control, and the other half of the equation, payback, depends on LTC’s price. Our guide on how to mine Litecoin on our blog makes that point directly: Litecoin is as volatile as any crypto, so paying off the hardware can take a very long time. A stretch of low prices pushes the payback date further out while the power bill stays exactly the same.

That makes a calculator like yours worth running with a few price scenarios, and it puts a lot of weight on the hardware choice. Any Scrypt ASIC will mine LTC, and at the wattages in your table, the efficiency of the specific model, hashrate per watt, decides whether the rewards or the bill come out ahead.